Wally

Wally is a character from the Dilbert comic strip. Inspired by a coworker of creator Scott Adams at Pacific Bell, he is a lazy employee always trying to work the system, although he is very capable at his occupation. In Seven Years of Highly Defective People and What Would Wally Do, Adams explained that his co-worker at Pacific Bell wanted to avail himself of the generous severance packages being offered by the company during a period of downsizing, because he was told there was no future for him at the company; he thus embarked on a mission to get fired. Adams was inspired by this co-worker's serious dedication toward this goal, and the concept of a completely shameless employee with no sense of loyalty became Wally. Another story from Adams have him based on a co-worker who made some sort of error, not huge enough to get him fired, but huge enough to wreck any chance of ever advancing in the company. Without any incentive to work hard, he began to do as little work as he could, and successfully managed to stay with the company for years.

In the animated series, we discover that Wally was once a great programmer. As described by a female employee in a flashback "He just programmed an entire database from scratch!" He is used later in the episode to solve the Y2K bug while being hypnotized.